


The Sum of All My Parts

by Etalice



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Botany, Depressing Crack, Depression as a metaphor for depression, Lycanthropy as a metaphor for depression, M/M, POV Second Person, Werewolf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-24 14:04:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 14,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13215315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Etalice/pseuds/Etalice
Summary: And it was never going to be easy, because easy is not for people like you, is not for people with war-worn hearts and wolves under their skins and bones that turn to chalk.Neville's in denial and Draco has lycanthropy. At some point along the way, they meet and fall in love.





	1. Marigold (Calendula Officinalis)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic began as a challenge with friends: we decided to draw a random ship paring and one setting element, and to each write a crackfic, as a bit of lighthearted fun.
> 
> And then, sometimes along the way, my crack became this - 12 chapters of whatever the hell this is. And if you're bizarre enough to read it, I hope you'll enjoy it because I really loved writing it.

It happens on a Tuesday. In hindsight, you’ll realise it’s not surprising that it should have, really. In hindsight, you’ll realise that Tuesday is a slippery kind of day, a day for unexpected visits and bittersweet surprises, a day that seems as solid and bright as Monday or Thursday but twists around faster than you know. A day that stabs you clean through your chest. But it’s only just began, that particular Tuesday, so you don’t realise anything ominous at all, you don’t even think about it being a Tuesday. You’re planning on repotting your mandrake plants because it’s October and because they’re taking up all the space on the kitchen table; you’re planning on drying chrysanthemum petals to pepper into potions and on harvesting acorns to scatter across your windowsills for protection and on accomplishing all the small everyday tasks that let you trick yourself into thinking you’re okay, and you’re alive, and this is how it’s meant to be. 

So you repot your mandrakes. It’s a bloody mess, really, the roots won’t stop screaming their awful little heads off, there’s mud all over the floor and you’re not sure how you’ll be able to scrub it off the tiles. But it feels good, the magic bubbling in your veins, the dark soil spilling onto the light wood of the table, onto the white and blue ceramic under your feet, the rich, cool earth atyour fingertips; this is how you do “alive”, it is. This is who you are, (you keep telling yourself) you’re the boy with the green thumbs, you’re the boy who whispers to plants, he who makes life spring forth from the ground. There’s a certain comfort in the act of defining yourself, these days, and you know it’s not always been that way - you used to be “Neville”, you used to be just “Nev”, and everything you were used to fit neatly into that word - but your name has become a wrong-size shoe, and so you describe yourself in polite euphemisms these days, so you break down all the parts of yourself and keep only the good ones.

But you repot your mandrakes, and you don’t think about who you are, and which parts of you deserve to be shown to the world, and how much of what you show to the world is actually you. You don’t think about that at all because this is not what happy people do - and you’re happy, aren’t you? You have your own little flat (one bed, one bath in central London, with hardwood floors and white walls and large windows. _A real find_ , the real estate agent had said, handing you the keys.) and you’ve furnished it with an eclectic blend of Ikea and repurposed odds and ends, but most of all you’ve filled it with life, muggle and magical plants alike, dripping down in crisp green tendrils from the ceiling and shooting up from ceramic pots, and clear glass vases, coiling and twisting, running along the walls and covering every surface ( _It’s so you!_ Hermione had exclaimed when you showed her your flat, and you smiled like it was a compliment, and you didn’t tell her you had no idea it meant.) You have your own little flat, and you have your independent herbalist business, and you set aside a little money each month and you are happy, you are, because this is what happiness looks like (so what if some nights you can feel loneliness creep up and down the walls like spiders, so what if some days you think you could disappear entirely and no one would notice at all?)

And had you been thinking about this at all, the doorbell might have startled you, might have caused you to jerk and send a ceramic pot tumbling off the table and onto the floor where it might have shattered into terracotta coloured fireworks. But you weren’t, you weren’t, so you wipe your hands on your jeans and you make your way to the door. 

You aren’t expecting anyone, your friends rarely visit you at all (not because you’re no fun to be around, not because you don’t laugh at their all jokes, not because you’re half-invisible at the best of times, not because of that, no) but these days, clients find their way to your door more and more often because word’s on the street that you can grow anything at all. And sure enough, at the door is a stranger, dressed in a cloak and robes and a potioneer’s dragonhide boots (and you mistrust him instantly because no one dresses like this anymore, not since the war, they don’t.) But he’s a client, so you put on your best herbalist face (a careful blend of smiles and capability) and let him in, through the hall into the living room, because you have muggle neighbours and he’s dressed like a circus trick. The stranger sits down on your Ikea couch, and pulls down his hood, and this is when you recognise him. On the striped white-and-blue cotton fabric, decked head to toe in poncey wizardingfinery, like an unwelcome ghost from a past you’re trying to forget, is Draco Malfoy. The sight of him punches the breath out of you, just like that; you pick up stray terracotta shards from the floor and say nothing.

He wants you to grow scotch marigolds for him, Draco Malfoy does. You would laugh at the absurdness of it all, you would, if his mere presence didn’t bring back all the memories you so desperately want to forget, if he didn’t make you become the boy with the sword, the boy with the snake, the boy with the blood on his hands. You want to tell him to get out of your home, you want to tell him he’s just another pureblood facist, you want to scream that you don’t care what happened at his trial, he’s guilty, guilty, guilty, that you want to be rid of him and his fancy dragonhide boots and his stupid flowing robes, you want to tear your chest open, fingers sticky-warm and coated in blood, digging through muscle and tendon, you want to make him look away in shame or disgust, you want to make him feel the way he’s making you feel.

You make him tea. You make him tea, and you keep all the words about the war hidden behind your ribs, and you agree to grow him marigolds. The floor, in the kitchen, is covered in broken crockery.

The next time Malfoy rings your doorbell, the marigold shoots are swaying gently in the warm autumn wind and the October sun is licking every surface golden. He wants to know how the marigolds are coming along, and he needs mugwort for a potion he’s brewing and he wants to know if you have some to sell. You listen, and you nod, and you give him a brown paper package on which you scrawl _Artemisia Vulgaris_ in a sloppy hand. And then, instead of escorting him back to your door, back onto the paved street of wizarding London where he belongs, you sit him down at your kitchen table and you make him tea. He talks about potions and herbs and intricate brewing processes, and it’s making his silver eyes light up, and you’restill not entirely sure that he was on the right side of the war, but his soft, warm, solid presence in your kitchen feels better than it should (not because you feel lonely, no, not because of that). So you make him tea, and you make him talk, and you laugh at all his jokes. 

And perhaps, this is why he keeps on coming, why he keeps requesting brown paper packages with latin names scribbled onto them in black sharpie ( _angelica sinensis,_ and _hamamelis virginia_ , and _rubia tinctorium_ ). Perhaps, this is why he keeps sitting down on your rickety white chairs, and drinking spiced tea from beige ceramic mugs, and letting his delicate fingers run along the veins of your birch wood table. And perhaps this is why you start noticing all the small things about him: the way his cool blond hair glistens under the electric lights, the way he laughs with his eyes closed and his head tilted back slightly, the way his hands are always restless and the way he never meets your eyes when you ask him questions he doesn’t want to answer. So you don’t ask the questions, so you tell him about your plants, and he tells you about his cauldrons, and you keep him at a safe distance.

And for a while, it feels just right, the two of you, talking potions and herbs in the soft warm glow of October.


	2. Firethorn (Pyracantha Coccinea)

With every passing day, the marigolds grow, and grow - soft yellow-green leaves and fuzzy stalks and golden flower buds unfurling into corollas of fragrant red-orange petals that melt into yellow at the centre. You watch them closely, at first, you charm them to attract the perfect amount of sunlight, you try to figure out the exact quantity of water they need. You tell yourself you do it with all your plants, you tell yourself you want your customer satisfied. Sometimes, when you’re feeling particularly honest, you admit to yourself maybe it is Draco’s warm presence in your kitchen that compels you to fuss about those plants so much. You don’t even think about how you do it to keep yourself occupied, how you let your hand do, and do, and do, and let the rest of you follows, drifting behind them; you don’t even think about how you hold onto the precise movements of your fingers and the meticulous functionality of your body to stop yourself from falling apart.

Some nights, you don’t sleep at all. You’re pinned to the bed by the weight of your own skin and the darkness that spreads across your face, inky black and suffocating (you feel it cling to your eyelashes, and seep inside your skull). These nights, you don’t move, you don’t turn and you don’t toss. You barely breathe. You try not to be alive. As soon as the horizon grows powdery pink and coral, you get up, you let your fingers curl around mugs of steaming dark liquid, you make a mental note to prune the devil’s snare (it’s gotten ahold of your coffee table). And with the first, bright sun of morning, you pretend nothing happened at all.

You watch the marigolds closely, at first, because you spend the last golden October days and the smooth fall into November in a whirlwind of motion, but then, you stop (you also stop not falling apart). It starts with the last of the hedgerow harvests and the heavy, humid November fog, that follows you home one day. It stops at the doorstep, at first, it licks at the windowpanes; so you close the blinds, and you lock the door, and you spend your days under your covers, terrified that it’ll find it’s way in. 

It does. 

It does (it seeps through the cracks in the windows and under the door) and it goes straight for you (a hawk, an osprey, an owl). It’s silent, silent, silent and deadlier than anything, the fog. It spills into your flesh, and calcifies in your liver, it sits heavy inside your bones and agglutinates around the tendons in your neck. It sucks the motion out of you, until your heart feels like wet sand, until the joints in your wrists start solidifying, until your head swims endlessly in layer upon layer of grey and blue. 

Some days, Draco visits you. Most days, he doesn’t, and you’re trapped in the greywhiteblue haze of time passing and the impossibility to get out of bed, but some days, he visits you, and his visits are the reason why you put on clothes in the morning more often than not (you refuse to admit it to yourself.) And he sits on your sofa, and at your kitchen table, and on the floor next to the henbane or the quaker’s buttons, and he stills tells you about potions but you don’t talk a lot about plants these days. You still think a lot about plants, of course, you still water them and prune them and weave complex nets of charms about them, but talking about them is difficult, these days: you’re too afraid words will tumble out of your mouth unbidden. Words like “I wish I could grow hemlock out of my chest”. Words like “I can think of several dozen ways to kill myself without getting out of my flat. (You’re sitting next to at least two of them.)” You don’t want to think about it would be like if you said those things; you’re terrified of what would happen if you did, and perhaps you’re even more terrified that nothing would happen at all, so you keep quiet, quiet, quiet until quiet screams with the constant whooshing of your blood against your eardrums. 

None of your other friends ever visit you. You tell yourself you’re not hurt about this at all. You tell yourself it’s not you, it’s never you. You remind yourself Hermione and Ron just had their second child, and of course they’ve sent you a lovely charmed card and of course they haven’t forgotten about you. (The card: red, with a tiny dragon that breathes fire. It’s the most Ron thing you’ve ever seen in your life and promptly tried to set the venomous tentacula on fire. You threw it out.) And Harry’s the head Auror now, and Ginny’s travelling all over the world, and they’re so busy, with their life and their work and with their three children. So, really, it is understandable they wouldn’t think of stopping by, isn’t it? It is, of course, it is so you tell yourself you’re fine (why wouldn’t you be?)

But, some days, Draco visits and you can breathe a little easier when he’s here, so it’s okay, you think, it’s okay that you don’t talk about plants, that you keep all your words caged behind your teeth. And you hold on to his presence, his soft laugh, his eyes on yours - a solid proof you’re still visible, a tangible sign you still exist in some form other than smoke or vapour. And you try to keep all of this (the fears, and the hope, and the fact you’ve been slowly solidifying) neatly stacked behind your face. You don’t think he notices anything different about you.

He notices something different about you. He doesn’t come outright and say it - well, what could he say ? You’re not friends, the two of you, you’ve only just started considering that maybe there was no right or wrong side to something as cruel as a war, and maybe that’s why he was never on the wrong side, or maybe you both were and it’s okay, maybe you can leave it behind. He can’t say anything, really, so he doesn’t, but the next time he rings your doorbells, and stands in your hallway in his ridiculous capes and robes and boots, the next time he comes into your home and sits down in your kitchen, he places a bottle of firewhiskey on the table. He doesn’t say anything at all, but the bottle is there, so you pour two glasses, so you toast to old friends. The firewhiskey is expensive, it shines like amber and burns like silk all the way down your throat (its golden richness: a sharp knife cut in the grey organdie around your head.) You pour two more glasses. Again. And again. You toast old friends, you toast the end of the war, you toast not being a teenager. 

Sometimes after the sixth glass, you toast being alive and that’s when it all turns into a flaming disaster. “I’m not sure I’m even alive, most days.” - his voice is soft and broken, barely a whisper. You could almost let yourself believe it was a trick of the mind, you could almost let yourself believe you’re making it up, because you want to hear it, because you’re so tired of being alone with the urge to die angry like hornets in the pit of your stomach, because you wish someone would reach out, anyone, really, anyone at all (because you’re so drunk you’ve forgotten you were pretending you had it all, you’re so drunk you’ve forgotten all about being reasonable and calm and content with the little you had, you’re so drunk you could burst into a thousand burning-smoking-crumbling pieces if only bodies worked that way.) You could almost let yourself believe the words never touched his lips at all, but you steal a glance at him, and his silver eyes are shining beautiful with tears and emotions and alcohol, and you know he meant every word.

“I kind of want to die all the time, except when I’m sleeping. And even then, I dream about it sometimes.” The words taste viscous and sweet like molasses on your tongue. You don’t dare looking at him at all so you stare at your slow, calcified hands, resting heavy in your lap. He lets out a sharp, bitter laugh: “I noticed.” Silence sits uncomfortably between you for a while. His delicate fingers coil like snake around his glass, nursing the amber liquid that sways from side to side with little swooshing sounds, in your ears, your blood and your shame do the same. You try to figure out what to say. You can’t come up with anything at all.

“Strange, isn’t it, how heavy the weight of just being alive is sometimes. I don’t know how anyone stands it” - he’s not looking at you at all, he’s staring at a spot on the floor (dirt, or a leaf, or a terracotta shard), but he’s talking to you all the same, so you spill out all the words that have been rattling inside your chest for days. You tell him about the fog, about the wet sand, about the stiffness. You tell him about the layers of blue-grey, and the heaviness in your bones, and the sadness sticking to your neck all the time. And he’s sitting there, in front of you, with his heart heavy and drunk, and you swear you can feel him understand every word, so you let your mouth is overflow with everything you didn’t think you wanted to say (but you did, oh you did, you did). 

You don’t look at him at all. You look at the flowers on the hellebore (the lightest green, and crimson-rimmed, and shaped like fairy cups), and you catalogue the leaves on the venomous tentacula (green, plump, slightly charred, deadly), and you count the vines hanging down from the ceiling (eighteen). And you don’t look at him at all, but it’s okay because he’s here, and he’s talking, and you’re talking, and it’s okay, it’s more than okay. It’s everything you ever needed.

The next day, you pretend it never happened. “We had a great time”, you’d say if anyone asked you (not that anyone would, of course, but you’d like to think someone could all the same) but you take all the memories with the tears and the emotions and the way Draco’s eyes glitter like silver and sadness, and you stack them neatly into a box inside your mind, and you tape it shut.You tell yourself it didn’t mean anything, you tell yourself it was a one-time thing. But instead of hiding behind walls and windowpanes, you go to the store. You buy firewhiskey. You stash it in your kitchen cabinet. You pretend it’s something you always do. It’s not.

Draco visits again. He sits on the floor this time, head resting on the white wall, legs stretched out before him. The bitter nightshade extends its vines from the shelf above him, fashioning him a crown out of green leaves and violet blooms and clusters of read and green berries, and you know they’re poison, the berries, but they were once said to have the power to dissolve blood, and cure bruises, and heal trauma. You think it’s a beautiful image; Draco closes his eyes and his mouth twists in a sad little line. You take out your bottle of firewhiskey, you pour two glasses. You don’t toast at all, you just throw it down your throats until you’re both sufficiently drunk to open up the vaults of your ribs and let the words drip from your lips. He says he’s lonelier than anything, you say you have nothing to live for. Wetness stains his eyes. You can’t remember if you cry too (you do). He looks at you with his intent, silver eyes, and you find you can’t look away so your slow, solidified hands find his, and you stroke them lightly, lightly, hoping wildly all the while your thumbs won’t forget how to move (your joints: filled with sand, full of ash,calcified and stiff. his skin: porcelain. velvet. ice.) He looks at you and he doesn’t move, and you keep stroking his skin, and tears keeps rolling silently down the perfect alabaster of his cheeks, and you’d give your liver or your limbs for this moment to last forever because you’re drawn to him like the tide, and it’s glorious, it is, it’s vast and unending and larger than anything. And he’s beautiful, he is, with his lush crown of leaves, of flowers, of red-green berries, with his endless quicksilver eyes, with his white-golden hair, so you watch him, and you watch him, and you think he’s poison, and you think he could uncongeal the blood in your veins, and you think he could heal all the bruises on your heart. And he doesn’t say anything at all, he just watches you, silent and bittersweet.

So you think about everything he could be, and you stare into his metalgleaming eyes, and you touch his skin, and you let your heart wrap around his like bindweeds. 

So you fall in love.

In the early hours of the morning, he steps out of the door, his eyes still heavy on your face. 

He doesn’t come again.


	3. Ivy (Hedera Helix)

_Y_ ou don’t notice, at first. 

You wake up with his eyes and his hair and his skin warm and bright in the pit of your stomach. You feel it before you even open your eyes, it sits inside your mouth like warm honey, it fills your skin with light. So you don’t open your eyes — not yet, not yet, not while you can still imagine his skin on your skin, his eyes on your eyes, his soft breath mingling with yours. So you don’t open your eyes and you commit every single small detail of him to memory, so you catalogue every single beautiful thing about him, so you luxuriate in the thought of Draco who has eyelashes so fair, and Draco who has eyes so bright, and Draco who has skin so soft.

And he’s beautiful, you remember, and he understands, you whisper onto the skin of your thumbs ( _oh, he understand, oh he listens, oh he does, he does, he does_ ). It’s all you can even think about, your mind and your chest and all the movements of your fingers are saturated with Draco, Draco, Draco. Draco who feels lonelier than anything, Draco who looked into your eyes like he was about to shatter (like glass, like — like crystal, you decide. Like something precious and fragile. Something you want to keep and treasure.) Draco. Draco who let you listen to his words, and hold his hand, and stroke his skin.

It fills you, this hope, this connection, this longing. It makes you feel alive for the first time in weeks, it keeps the leaden weight of wanting to die away from your stomach, it keeps your bones from calcifying, it keeps your spine from turning into stone. So in the golden light of three in the afternoon, you lie on the floor, and you stare at the ceiling, and you feel so warm and soft it’s unbearable (it almost doesn’t scare you).

And you live, and you breathe and you dream but most of all, you wait for Tuesday. Through Wednesday, and Thursday, and Sunday, you wait for Tuesday.

Tuesday comes and Tuesday goes. 

Draco doesn’t. 

It crawls cold on your skin, his absence. You feel your heart swell up painfully in your chest, like a sponge full of dirty dishwater, like a beehive without a queen. Disappointment sits heavy in your throat and presses tears into your eyes. It is overwhelming, that feeling — it is, and that’s the worse thing about it. It is, and it exists, and it fills your stomach with holes and you can’t make it stop being.

You try.

You try. He doesn’t come every week, you remind yourself. Maybe he couldn’t make it, you tell yourself. And he has a good reason, of course. He’ll come next week, maybe he’ll come and he’ll explain and you’ll feel silly that you ever doubted, you convince yourself.

The reminding, and telling, and convincing? It doesn’t work. 

The sadness sticks heavy and viscous to your shoulders and you drag it behind you everywhere you go. The memories of him are a tight ball of pins and each time you turn, and each time you move, it pricks at the linings of your stomachs, it sits uncomfortably in your lungs, and your liver, and on your trachea. He didn’t come. The sound of it rings inside your skull with every breath.

_He didn’t come._

_He didn’t come._

_He didn’t come._

You resolve to wait for Tuesday again (through Friday… through Saturday… through Monday…) 

The light in your stomach is gone. 

You resolve to wait for Tuesday because waiting’s all your good for. You can hardly move, you can hardly breathe. You don’t dare hope.

You hope anyway.

Another Tuesday comes, and another Tuesday goes. He still doesn’t show up on your doorstep, he doesn’t write, doesn’t give any sign of life. In your chest, your heart shatters like clay and you feel the small terracotta shards grating and grinding under your footsteps every time you move.

You stop moving.

You stop doing.

You solidify.

 

 

 

 

There is nothing else to say.


	4. Holly (Ilex Aquifolium)

The bastard comes again.

Shortly after New Year’s Eve, pissed drunk and in the middle of the night, the bastard comes again.

And it goes like this: 

It’s two in the morning and you’re not asleep. It’s two in the morning and you’ve been laying in your bed, staring at the ceiling, practicing not moving at all. It’s two in the morning and he’s banging on your door, yelling his bloody head off in the hallway. You don’t recognise his voice, or perhaps you do, perhaps that’s why you get out of bed so quickly, perhaps that’s why you carry the heaviness of your body through your flat (crumbled clay under every footstep), perhaps that’s what compels you to open your door to a loud, drunken stranger. 

So you get up, so you open the door, and there he is, a flaming disaster of drunken mess: his hair is lanky and dirty and sticking to his face, he’s wearing a pair of jeans (grey, tight, muggle) and a flowing silk shirt (wizarding, stained and half unbuttoned); he’s accessorised with an empty bottle of something that smells like gasoline or rubbing alcohol. He’s a catastrophe, and he’s standing there, and he’s drunk out of his mind, and he’s more beautiful than you remember, and the sight of him goes clean through your chest. You grab his shirt and pull him inside. You tell yourself it’s because he’s shouting nonsense in your hallway, within earshot of your sleeping, muggle, neighbours. The silk feels soft, and liquid in your fingers and your heart tightens behind your ribs.

You grab his shirt, and you pull him inside, and he’s pissed drunk and you’re pissed at him so you shove him against the wall and you hiss at him to _shut up, just shut up, you arsehole_ through your teeth. He shoves you away, eyes gleaming like daggers. “Don’t come near me” — his voice sounds like violence and alcohol. 

You take a step back, arms fists balled and trembling, and eyes still stuck on his beautiful face, and breath short and halting. You take a step back and you try to find something to say but the words all sound wrong so you keep your mouth tightly shut and you set him on fire with your eyes instead. He’s leaning against the wall, white knuckled and filled to the brim with emotions you can’t quite decipher.

“What do you think you’re doing here?” — you finally manage, and your voice is lava, and your voice is magma, and your voice is molten rocks and fire. “You need to know”, he slurs, “you need to know that you can’t trust me. You need to know I’m not someone you should be close to.” His eyes are on you, burning holes into your skin like acid as he stands perfectly, beautifully still. And that stillness enrages you — how can he? How can he stand so still, how can he be so solid in your living room, how can he say those words to your face? He’s still as stone and you’re incensed and you’re so hurt and your heart broke so long ago, so you take a step towards him, menacing, words slipping through your clenched teeth ( _don’t, you wanker, don’t you dare tell me what to do_ ). You take another step, holding his gaze all the while. He doesn’t move, he stays still, so very very still. He’s a beautiful alabaster statue, you think, precious and rare, and you want to smash him to a thousand tiny pieces.

You take another step, and you shove him against the wall, palms flat on his shoulder blades, breath hot and vicious against the stillness his face. You can’t quite tell if he tries to push you away but he’s too drunk, and you’re too desperate, and you cling to his skin, pissed and infatuated and heart-broken all at once. And you speak again, your voice a shadow of a whisper, the words spilling from your lips like ink or blood ( _you didn’t come_ and _why_ and _I waited for you, you bastard, I waited for you_ ). 

He doesn’t move. 

Your heart is breaking and the bastard doesn’t move. You don’t know what to do, and you don’t know what to say, and you feel like you’re going to shatter or collapse or burst because you haven’t understood anything in so long, because you still don’t know what he’s doing here or why he’s not moving or why he keeps looking at you with eyes of acid and daggers. You want to punch the tosser, force him to move, force him to acknowledge your presence or your pain or your existence. 

You kiss him instead. 

You kiss him because then and there, you can’t find anything better to do, his mouth burning hot on yours, his breath heavy and hitched. You kiss him and you bite his lip and you caress his skin. He doesn’t move at all. “You don’t know what you’re doing”, he rasps against your neck. “You don’t know who I am.” 

He still doesn’t move. 

“Why don’t you tell me then?”, you spit, staring into his face, rage and despair burning, defiant and white-hot behind your eyes. He looks away, pain and shame all at once eating at his face, and it’s your turn to not move at all, out of fear he’ll disappear again if you do.

He stares at the floor. 

You stop breathing.

“I’m a werewolf” he finally says, a strangled sob that goes straight through your chest. “I can’t…” his voice breaks and you feel your heart behind your ribs gleaming and thumping and heavier than anything. “You can’t…” — you don’t let him finish. You kiss him again, and you whisper, and you sob, and you pant into his mouth. “I don’t care, you idiot”, you say. “I don’t fucking care and don’t you dare leave again, you asshole”. You kiss him and you kiss him and you kiss him and between each kiss, you profess that you don’t care that he’s a werewolf, andyou don’t care that you can’t, that he can’t, and you don’t care that he doesn’t think he deserves to be loved. You utter the words like a bite or a punch or a fight, in a vicious and desperate kind of way, and you hold him against the wall, your palms still flat on his chest and your body crushed against him. And you kiss him, and you kiss him, and you kiss him until finally something snaps inside him, and he gives in, and he kisses back.

He kisses back and it’s a tide, unfurling, and submerging you, and drowning you. He doesn’t hold back at all, and it’s vicious, and it’s violent, and it’s beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. He bites your lip, and grabs your arms and digs his fingers into your flesh. He breathes hot air onto your skin, eyes still acid and daggers and danger all at once. He kisses you like he’d kill himself, you think, and you kiss back harder, to keep him alive.

Kissing Draco is heat, and want, and need, and desperation all at once. His teeth are on your neck, his breath burning and licking at your collarbones, his hands fisted in your hair, and everything he is pours into all the holes in your chest. You crush him against the wall, he pulls you in, he holds you and holds you and holds you until you want to melt into him, meld your skin with his, become him, or let him become you. And you’re drunk on his scent and on the warmth of his skin, and he’s drunk on cheap brandy, but he’s kissing you and licking the tendons of your neck and nipping at the line of your jaw so you don’t care, you don’t care, you don’t care. And you want him to fill you, you want him to make you complete again, you want him so desperately, and you lose yourself in him, in his hands and teeth and eyes and face and oh god, you love him.

_You love him_ , _you love him_ , _you love him_. “I love —” Half broken whisper, half moan, the words rise unbidden from your throat. 

He freezes.

“Don’t.” The word coils, dangerous and cold as a snake on his lips and around your neck. _Don’t._ It sounds like ice, like flint, like iron. _Don’t._ Don’t tell him you love him. Don’t love him at all. 

You love him anyway.

You love him, and you kiss him, and when you do, he kisses you back, and you tumble to the floor in a fluid motion of intoxication and desire so you fold the interdiction tightly and you hide it in your heart and you forget about it. So you place all the words in your kiss, and you lick them along the skin of his shoulders, and you caress them onto his neck and his cheeks and his hair and the small of his back. And you lose yourself in him until you can’t remember your name anymore, and you breathe, and you breathe, and you breathe, at last.

You love him.

He falls asleep under you with the first rays of sunlight and you stroke his face, and you thread your fingers in his hair, and you’re almost entirely sure that you’re happier than you’ve ever been. You lay you head on his chest, and you hold his hand, and, on the cold hardwood floor, you find sleep more easily than you have in months. So what if you can’t tell him you love him, so what if there are words that can never cross the threshold of your lips; in your bones, you know you’re entirely done for, and you love him, and you love him, and you love him, and there’s no turning back now.

You treasure the knowledge of it with your last waking breath.


	5. Snowdrops (Galanthus Nivalis)

Later, you’ll remember how drunk he was when he showed up on your doorstep, dishevelled and beautiful in the dead of night. Later, you’ll think of everything that could have gone wrong that night, the next morning, the following week. Later, you’ll think back to everything, and it’ll be a bittersweet memory, the kind that feels like honey and vinegar on your tongue all at once, but for a while, it’s perfect. 

He wakes up the next morning and you’ve been awake for the better part of an hour. He wakes up the next morning and you’ve already run eight different scenarios through your head, all of them ending in disaster and pain and him leaving again. He wakes up, and he doesn’t leave. Instead, he smiles at you, and you feel your heart dripping down your ribs like molten metal, and a small, bright, tight kind of hope fills the bone of your jaw, because he is looking at you, and threading his fingers through yours, and he is gorgeous, and warm, and he is, he is —

“Are you alright?” you manage, pushing the words out of your mouth like pebbles. “I mean, you were pretty drunk, yesterday.” He opens his mouth,and he draws a breath, and suddenly, you feel your heart tightening and your blood thumping in your throat and you realise that you don’t want an answer, you don’t want to hear the explanation, you don’t want anything to taint his bright warm presence, and his skin on yours, and his smile on your face. You look away, you clench your teeth; the devil’s snare has extended its vines onto the floor while you slept and they’re swaying gently, gently, soothing and almost hypnotic. You hold on to the green like you’re drowning.

“I wasn’t…” A silence. “I wasn’t that drunk,” he lies (and you can’t tell if the lie is for your benefit, or his.) It sits heavy on your tongue, his lie, it itches like sandin your collarbones every time you move your head. You don’t say anything and your coward heart gleams heavy in your chest. You let his smiles and his fingers on your skin and his breath in your neck take their roots in falsehoods and versions of reality that have never happened, but it is good anyway, isn’t it? But he’s touching you, and kissing you, and loving you (isn’t he? isn’t he? he must be, he must be.)

He stays. You make him coffee, and you laugh at all his stories (potions, and customers, and owls that can’t find their ways in the dark), and you forget. You forget all the mornings you couldn’t get out of bed, and you forget the frost outside of your door, and you forget the clay underneath the soles of your feet. And you’d give anything, you’d give anything for that gorgeous man to love you, to need you, to want you, so you laugh and you forget, so you crawl out of your skin because it turns out that your skin’s become too small, and too tight, and not yours at all. And it’s reckless, it is, but you don’t care because his laugh shines like the sun, brighter and warmer than anything. You don’t care because it feels like he’s everything you’ve been missing your entire life.

He comes again, on Tuesdays, and on Thursdays, and late on Saturday nights. He comes, and comes, and comes until he feels like an organic part of your life, until you’re Neville again because he says your name when you open the door, and at the end of sentences, and when he kisses you. And this is who you are now, you are Neville — Neville who loves plants, and Neville who can makes anything grow, and Neville who loves beautiful boys with quicksilver eyes and cornsilk hair. You’re intoxicated with everything he is, and you let go, and you lose yourself in his touch, and his scent, and the melodious sound of his voice. 

And it’s okay, that you keep some words trapped like stone behind your teeth, it’s okay that you keep quiet, quiet, quiet some nights when his demons crawl up and down his skin. It’s okay that you can’t always keep him safe from the viscous darkness that suffocates him sometimes. 

It’s okay, you keep telling yourself.

And it would be a lie to say it doesn’t hurt, of course. It does, and it’s a glorious kind of hurt, it’s pain and pleasure, and anticipation and purpose all at once, it rises like tidal waves in your chest and it presses heavy and bright behind your eyes, and it fills you, it fills you, it fills you. Some nights, when he’s not there, you feel crushed under the weight of the emotions and more alive than you’ve ever felt in your entire life. Some nights, when he sleeps on your couch or in your bed, you feel ready to burst with the pure, violent light of the knowledge that you love him (white-blue and radiant). He doesn’t let you touch him, he doesn’t let you go beyond kisses and your fingers on his face and your mouth on his neck. And it’s okay, it’s okay, he’s perfect and gorgeous and almost entirely yours.

He doesn’t let you touch him until he does, and you treasure the memory of it under your tongue, like a gold coin or a laurel leaf. 

It happens late on a Monday night, or perhaps it’s early Tuesday morning, and you’ve been talking for hours now, and you’re both more naked than you’ve ever been even though you’re both fully clothed. You’re laughing, because you’re both tired out of your minds, because he’s said something self-deprecating and you could taste the words on your tongue as if they were yours. You’re laughing because it feels so right, being understood at last. You’re laughing but his eyes are on you, suddenly, intense and deeper than anything, magnetic, drawing you in. He reaches out and you can feel the depth of his desire, and it’s giving you chills (down your neck, and down your arms, and down down down to your ankles and your feet and your toes). You reach out for his hand (fingers shaking, heart tight and ready to burst). He pulls you to him, and he holds you, and he kisses you, and he pushes you onto the floor in one fluid motion. He’s feverish warm and radiating desire, hands clumsy and trembling on your skin, and you let yourself melt entirely into his touch. So you kiss him, and you kiss him, and when he pulls on your shirt, you whisper — _oh god yes —_ a come on into his neck. And there’s something that lights up inside your chest as his fingers tangle into the soft cotton of your shirt, as yours wrestle with the small pearl buttons of his, there’s something that feels like a beacon, or a lighthouse trapped behind your ribs because this, all of this, all of this is so right and so beautiful, beautiful… _Beautiful_ , you whisper onto his eyelashes as his fingers makes it to the button of your jeans. _Beautiful_ , you whisper again as he pulls the rough fabric down your legs. _Beautiful_ — the nakedness and the trust and the feelings of pleasure that build inside your bones, inside your teeth. You let go, entirely, of everything you thought you were until you forget your name and there is just this, beautiful and bright.

And the moment, stretches, stretches, stretches — a tangle of limbs, and breaths, and bodies. You feel the lighthouse inside you turning into a star, or the sun, or the gates of heaven with every stroke and every touch and every soft breath in your ear. You bite your tongue because you find that all the words you can remember at all are _I love you, I love you, I love you. Y_ ou bite your tongue but sounds slip out unbidden all the same _oh_ through _oh_ your _oh_ teeth and they echo in your skull like the heady crash of a hammer on a gong. And you’d gladly die in that instant, you think, but you don’t becausehe’s whispering your name ( _Neville, oh Neville, oh)_ every time you move against him just like, _oh like_ _this, don’t stop, don’t stop_. And you don’t die and you don’t stop because you want more — more of his mouth on you mouth, more of his voice on your skin (o _h god, oh god, yes, yes)_ , more of his hands on you. You want more, and more, and more until everything inside you explodes like fireworks.

As you fall asleep in his arms and on the floor, pleasure still ringing through your body like the thrumming vibrations of a singing bowl, you don’t tell him you love him, and he doesn’t say anything at all, but in that instant, you swear you can feel it, you swear his cells and yours are attuned somehow and you know, oh you know. He loves you, that gorgeous boy. And you’re too old — you’re not teenagers anymore, you’re too old to be feeling this strongly, and loving this wildly, and falling asleep, exhausted and interwoven and satiated on tiled floors. You’re too old to feel this good about it all, but you do, you do and he loves you and you love him and this is everything you need.

And in this moment — if only in this one, short, fleeting moment, lying on the kitchen floor with the warm heavy weight of his head on your chest, and the slow breaths of sleep rising from his throat and the golden silk of his hair caressing your jaw — you truly believe with all your heart everything will be okay.

And in this blessed moment, you don’t yet know how wrong you are.


	6. Thimbleweed (Anemone Nemorosa)

Your heart gleams and glows throughout February and, as the thimbleweed blooms cover the forest floors like a thick, beautiful, white blanket, all the words you can taste on your tongue are his name. And you want to have this forever, you want to hold onto this bond, his fingers on your neck and your words on the skin of his lips. And you want to keep it and treasure it and never let it go but March has a way of delivering the bitterest snow storms onto the frailest budding flowers and it all goes to hell.

As the days slip into spring, the moon wanes and waxes again (crescent and first quarter and gibbous) and as it rises later and later everyday, inexorable and unmovable, Draco grows more and more agitated. It’s barely perceptible at first, it’s in the way he hardly holds your gaze anymore, it’s in the way he keeps staring at his hands, it’s in the way his fingers are restless (always dancing around teacups and tables, always fluttering around your hands like soft, pale moths burning up in the light of a candle flame).

You hold onto him. 

You figure that like the moon grows and grows and shrinks and shrinks and disappears, closeness will fade into distance and into closeness again. And it will be okay, you decide, and you will wait it out, you promise, and you’ll make it through, you tell yourself, but when you close your eyes, in the infinitely lonely silence of dark, in the vast empty mattress of the nights he doesn’t sleep next to you, the black behind your eyelids keeps screaming that it won’t be okay at all. You hold your breath and you bite your fist and you twist all the muscles of your face into paper cranes to wish the words away. Nothing helps at all, and fear crushes your spleen, and apprehension crawls up and down your guts like spiders.

It won’t be okay, and the knowledge of it sits like a stone in your stomach, weights down the bones of your shoulders, solidifies in the spaces between your jaw and your teeth.

It won’t be okay, but what can you do? There’s nothing you can do, really, but love him, and oh you love him, you love his clever, restless fingers and the soft skin of his wrists, you love his laugh and his eyes and the way his words fit in with yours like puzzle pieces. But you love him, and you hold onto him, and you don’t let go. But you take his fingers in yours and you still them, and you stroke them, and you hold them. But you touch his face softly, softly, but you cup his chin and caress his cheeks and whisper “I’m here” in the dead of night and in the cold light of morning and when the sun sets.

He never answers.

And it should be enough, shouldn’t it? It should be enough that you’re so in love, that you’re so devoted, that you’re unmoving, all-encompassing and steady. It should be enough, it should be enough, it should be enough. 

It isn’t.

It isn’t, and he grows more and more distant by the day, until you feel the wolf under his skin sometimes, until he seems so indifferent that you wonder if the skin is not all that’s left of him, just this vast ocean of softness, just the scent of soap thrown over this wild, dangerous beast. And you don’t know what to do, but you try, oh you try, oh you do. You try to touch him, you try to reach him, you try to talk to him. 

You try to hold his soul in the chalice of your hands until he turns human again.

“Talk to me”, you repeat endlessly. “Talk to me, oh please, oh please”, you beg and you plead until you’re reduced to tears and you whisper promises onto the cold skin of his fingers ( _I’ll do better, I’ll do better_ ). You dig your fingers inside you chest, you pry the ribs open, you rip all the veins and all the arteries apart and you hold your heart out to him, bloody, and beating unsteady like a lone war drum, and hurt, hurt, hurt. “Talk you me” you say again, as you bleed into his hands and onto the floor.

He doesn’t talk at all.

It hurts that he doesn’t talk, it hurts that he keeps shutting down, and shutting you out, and shutting you up. It hurts that when you whisper his name softly, he doesn’t look at you anymore. It hurts that the sound of the word that used to be soft like smoke on your tongue, curlingand twirling lazily upwards in the honeyed silence between you is now full of sharp corners and sharper edges. It hurts that his eyes don’t look into yours anymore, it hurts that they used to be quicksilver, mellow and liquid, it hurts that they used to glow so warm and deep, it hurts that they’re hard and shallow as steel now. It hurts that his hands don’t seek yours out anymore, even though your fingers still reach for his.

It hurts.

It hurts and you feel the cracks forming, forming, forming, along your arms, and across your cheeks and clean through your chest. But you’re a good boy, but you’re a kind boy, but you’re a lover and a pincushion and a brick wall, so you hold all your words in your throat, so I keep all the thoughts of death safely behind your eyes. Because he needs you, doesn’t he? He needs you, because he’s the one with the wolf’s eyes when the moon grows round, because it’s not him, it’s not him, it’s the lycanthropy, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

He needs you, so you steel yourself and you become the face of a cliff, wind-beaten and eroded by sea, and you let the waves of his indifference, of his hurt, of his distance crash around the rock of your body and you don’t stay a word. This is the best you can be, you tell yourself. And if you’re good enough, and if you’re steady enough, and if you’re quiet enough and you endure enough, maybe he won’t leave you, maybe he’ll keep you close a while longer. And if you’re who he needs you to be, soft and pliable and malleable, maybe there will be light in his eyes and gold in his words and warmth in his touch once again. You hope, and hope, and hope because there’s nothing else that you can do at all. And you can’t live without him, so all there is left for you to do, you figure, is to be good enough, is to be just the right blend of perfect and flawed, just the kind mix of strong and fragile for him to let you back in. All there’s left for you to do is to be enough, just this, just good enough to be let back in.

You’re not good enough and you have no idea what it is you’re down wrong. And you’re not good enough and he won’t tell you why. And you’re not good enough and March melts into April and you break apart.


	7. Cowslip (Primula Veris)

Later, you’ll wonder if holding on was your own particular brand of denial. Later, you’ll think back and wonder if he did really need you at all, you’ll second guess all your instincts, you’ll think that perhaps you only needed him to need you, and that was all there was.

Later, you’ll take the whole thing apart in your head, cut off all the bad parts and lay them out in futile attempts to make sense of them, but when it happens, it’s just you in the middle of the storm, breaking apart and bursting at the seams. This is how it happens:

He shows up at your doorstep in the middle of the night, breaking your fragile restless sleep in half, and you don’t say a thing. He looks a fright, he does, his hair is stuck to the ivory skin of his forehead by the cold April rain, his eyes are darker than you remember, painted black and purple by the lack of sleep, his hands twisted into each other, fingers gnarled and knotted, skin like bark, nails bitten to the quick. He looks a fright and you heart bleeds in your chest because you know all too well that those nights, there’s nothing you can do. But he stares at you, dripping and broken, and you can feel every single cell on the surface of your skin shatters with the need to do — something, anything, anything at all to lift the heavy weight on his shoulders, to suck the fog out of his airways, to dispel the frost in his eyes.

You step aside, let him in, close the door behind him. You push his hair out of his eyes, you stroke the skin of his cheek. You try to warm the core of him, and you try to radiate your love through his capillaries and into veins, to water his heart with the light of your presence. You — 

“You crowd me.” The words punch the air clean out of your windpipes as he pushes you away. A wave of cold spreads down your spine and pools in pit of your stomach. 

“This is why I don’t come so much” he continues, inexorable. “You need to stop crowding me.”

All your words stick to the roof of your mouth like spoonfuls of peanut butter and you choke on everything you could have said. Your hands are stones suddenly, helplessly hanging alongside your thighs, and a rift forms clean through your ribcage. Behind your eyes, you feel tears, welling up like piles of pebbles. You fall apart.

“Don’t come then” you spit out. The words sting your tongue like poison, and you know you’ll regret them the moment they spill from your lips, but you’re so endlessly hurt, and so endlessly breaking, and you can’t help yourself. “Stay lonely and leave me alone, if you hate coming so damn much.”

And your words, they must have poisoned his heart, you think, because his eyes grow wet as his face grows betrayed. He’s the one choking now, he’s the one for whom the air is thicker than clay.

You don’t feel better at all.

“That was…” the words catch on his teeth. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean it like that.”

Silence settles like dust between the two of you. In a heavy clay pot on the side table, the bright red berries of the arum maculatum catch your eyes. They look waxed and polished, and you feel as if you’d eaten several handfuls of them (you catalogue: difficulties breathing, burning pain, irritations on the skin, in the mouth and the throat, swelling and a stomach that’s been turned inside out.)

“That really hurt”

His eyes, they shine with tears and hurt, but surely you should be the one hurting, shouldn’t you? Surely, you’re the one who’s all wrong. Surely, you’re the one who doesn’t know how to love, when it’s all you’ve been trying to do for month. Somehow, his hurt is just as cruel as his words now, stabbing sharp icicles at your heart every time you take a breath.

“Well, how do you think I felt? Hearing I crowd you. Like everything I’ve ever done is wrong for you, like I’ve never been good enough.”

You’re crying in earnest now: a dam breaking, a river leaving her bed, every single icecap melting all at once.

“I’ve tried. I’ve tried, and tried, and tried, and it never touches you. Do you have any idea of how hard it is? Do you? I’ve just been watching you wasting away, and I’ve been there, day in, day out. I’ve been there when you show up in the middle of the night, and I’ve been there when you don’t show up at all. I’ve… You’ve… You’ve just been so inaccessible all the time, and I can never say the right thing. I can never do the right thing.”

You’re crying so much you can’t breathe at all and the weight of your existence is crushing you now. You feel like breaking, or imploding like a dying star. You feel like turning to ash or stone, like letting the green tendrils of nature wrap around your limbs and crawl on your face, like never being human again.

He takes your hand, and you think you can pick out a glint of worry behind all the emotions you can’t decipher in his eyes.

“It’s just… I’m fragile too.” He says, his voice earnest and steady. “It takes a lot for me to let myself be fussed about, and I do it for you, because I know you need to do something but sometimes, I just can’t take it anymore.”

You hate that his voice is this earnest. You hate that his voice is this steady. You wish he’d hold you tight and say he’s sorry. You wish he’d tell you he loves you and let you forget all about this — this: his words, the hurt, the rift in your chest. You hate that he’s being so rational and cool, you hate that his words are hard and measured and smooth as stones. You hate that they pile up between the two of you, large and heavy, disruptive and cold.

Impossible to ignore.

And you take him in your arms all the same, and he whispers against your hair that he cares about you a lot, and you don’t tell him you love him even though it’s all that you can think about.

“It’s not you. It’s not you.” He repeats against soft cotton of your shoulder but his words echo in the hollow of your chest, so you smile reassuringly at him.

“I know”, you say, as to lull him to sleep. “I know.”

But all you can think about is the pile of rubble in your heart and all the cold, harsh words that now stand between the two of you. 


	8. Bluebells (Scilla Cernua)

You tell him you love him in May. Rains wraps you in wetness as in a shroud, in May, and in the unbearable cold, and in the insufferable quiet, you tell him you love him. You hadn’t planned on it, you were going to keep all the words in the hollow of you throat like you had been since January. You were going to whisper them at the back of the door once it had closed behind him and dance around them and never let them be known. But everything had been crumbling for weeks and cracks had been appearing along the edges of your feelings and there’s a rift where your heart was a month ago and you’re suddenly afraid that you’ll never get to say those four words. 

It’s overwhelming, the fear, it’s coiling around your bones and growing in your lungs and crushing your spleen. It’s the glue between both of your hearts slowly dissolving and you’re afraid afraid afraid that it will be too late soon because you keep wielding his name like it’s a sword, gleaming and sharp with all the readiness to cut and all the potential to kill, because you’re holding your own fatigue like it’s a shield, hiding behind _I’m sorry_ and _I can’t do this anymore_ and _It’s not worth it, not like that._ You’re afraid that it will be too late soon because you won’t think those words anymore so you hold on to them like a lifeline, so you throw them out to sea. 

He doesn’t answer and the words taste like goodbye.

You hold onto them all the same because these are words you can keep close and understand and taste in your mouth like brandy. You hold onto them because if you don’t, there is only “you crowd me”, and those words are shaped like sharp stones and you desperately need something — anything — to numb the piercing pain of the cuts they make on the inside of your cheek and the inside of your chest.

You keep trying to ignore them, those words. You keep trying to climb over the cold wall of “you crowd me”, you keep trying to leave it behind and run, run, run until you can find your breath again. You keep trying to forget it and you keep not forgetting at all, and it goes on being all there is, in the middle of each conversation and in the periphery of every thought. You keep fighting, and fighting, and fighting until you’re exhausted and empty, and you keep wringing your hands together in a thousand restless prayers until you’re aching and breaking.

Nothing works.

The words stand, imposing and unmoving, in front of you still and it is entirely unbearable, so you tell him you love him.

It doesn’t change a thing.


	9. Meadowsweet (Filipendula Ulmaria)

Sometimes, you think he loves you too.

“How can you not know?”, he’d say if you told him, but you don’t mean it in the way he means it. You don’t mean the kind of love where he tolerates your presence, and doesn’t mind accepting all the feelings you keep placing in the cup of his hands. You mean the kind of love that burns, and burns, and burns and is truer than anything.

Sometimes, you think he loves you too, because of all the little things. Sometimes, you see love in behind his heavy eyelids when he’s had too much to drink and he stares at your face, foggy and indecipherable. Sometimes, you hear love in the way he says your name in the middle of the night, your feel love in the touch of his lips on the skin of your hands. Sometimes, you get a glimpse of what you wish you could have, of a world you don’t even dare to voice.

Sometimes, the lycanthropy recedes for a little while and he’s Draco again — soft, and warm, and broken in a way that you recognise. Sometime, he still sits down at your kitchen table and sets his delicate hands on the raw, earth-stained wood and these instants are more precious than he knows. You catalogue them, like you’d preserve sweet summer fruit in sugar to comfort you in the midst of winter, you try to commit their light, their softness, their warmth to memory.

Sometimes, you think he loves you, and you try to make those thoughts into the strength you need to hold onto him.

You tell this to Parvati when she knocks at your door in hope you’ll have some lady’s mantle to sell her (you do.) You fetch it and weight it, you wrap it up in brown paper and tie it together with string like you always do but you don’t write _alchemilla vulgaris_ because it would remind you of who Draco used to be. Instead, you tell her everything.

She listens, Parvati, with those lovely chestnut eyes of hers, velvet and silent and kind. She listens, and she smiles gravely, and all the words you didn’t know how to find come flowing out suddenly (lively and cold and crystalline, like snow thawing out in the spring). You don’t even really know what she needs the alchemilla for (some sort of skin care potion or something for her new line of haircare, perhaps.) and you know you shouldn’t talk this much unprompted, you do, but she’s here and you’ve had no one for so long and you have so much to say suddenly.

You tell her about the emptiness. You tell her about how Draco’s never really there even when he’s standing or sitting or sleeping next to you. You tell her how he always locks up all his problems inside his ribcage and never opens up for you — you tell her how much it hurts that he swears up and down he opens for others, that he’ll open for his mother even though she let him be dragged in the middle of a war he was too young to fight, even though she let him be hurt and torn and crushed by the expectations everyone else had for him. You tell her how you don’t understand why it is that you’re never enough, that you can never quite be enough, although you try and try to be good and kind, although you try and try to be understanding and sweet. You tell him how betrayed you feel, how alone and useless. You tell her about the pile of stones sitting in your heart. You’re half crying, half whispering by the end of it, but she listens intently all the same, and you can’t express how grateful you are for that.

“You need to let go”, she says softly when you’ve finished haemorrhaging through every single thing that happened through winter and through spring. “You need to let go, it’s not healthy to hold on like that.”

You know she’s right, so you nod. It makes you sadder than you express but you still nod because you don’t have it in you to keep lying to yourself, and pretending, and constructing make believe worlds where Draco loves you. You don’t say anything else, but you nod, and she finds all the right reassuring words, and she speaks of who you used to be, the boy with the sword and Nev and the boy with the glowing heart (“you’ve brought down that damn maniac, Nev, you’ve wielded the sword of Gryffindor and stared death in the face and I’ll be damned if you let yourself be walked all over by some pretty, sad boy.”)

That night, sleep eludes you. You lie awake in your bed and think of everything that’s happened since you were the boy who played the snake. You think of the war until your eyes are underwater and everything hurts. You think of the aftermath, of how connected you used to feel with everyone. You think of how you rebuilt your life piece by piece, you think of how you held Ron’s hand at Fred’s funeral, and how Luna always seemed to appear in every room after nan died. Funny, you think, how everything changed, how you slipped out of everyone’s life unnoticed until Draco was the centre of your world. The memories, they leave a bitter taste on your tongue and you swear you can taste it for days afterwards.

Parvati comes again. “Elderwort”, she says and you both pretend she’s not checking on you. You package it neatly for her, fragrant flowers and leaves wrapped in the usual brown paper but before you hand it to her, you write _Sambucus Ebulus_ in block letters on the top right corner. She smiles when you do, perhaps because she believes it’s you moving on, or perhaps because _Sambucus Ebulus_ is a silly name for something you both know as Danesblood or Blood Hilder — a bit like Neville is a silly name for someone this broken, this scarred, for someone this war-worn and weary. She asks if you’re feeling better, and you’re not really sure what to tell her.

You tell her you do. 

You tell her you do, and you tell her you’re trying to heal, and you tell her you’re trying to find your was back to who you were. 

She smiles and reaches out for your hand, her skin is warm and soft on yours (but your gut twists violently as you remember how Draco’s hands used to feel like velvet and ice, back when you were falling in love with him.)

“I’m sorry, Nev. I’m sorry it’s turned out like that for you. And I’m sure he’s not a bad person, but he’s not right, is he?”

And he’s not right at all, you know, you know, but what is there for you to do? And he’s not right, but this is all the more reasons you should stay, until he is right again, until he can breath and smile again, until his skin is warm and the clouds clear away from his eyes.

“I know”, you say. “I know”, even though you really, really don’t.

“You can’t let yourself be hurt just because he’s hurting himself, love. He needs to work that out on his own and if you stay in his way, you’re just going to end up collateral. You need to let go because he’s going to hurt you until you do.”

“I am.” you say, eyes sticking to the ground, hand still in hers. “I am, letting go, I mean.”

And it’s not a lie, really, because you haven’t seen Draco for weeks now — he hasn’t shown up at your doorstep, and he hasn’t owled, and you’ve been dealing with the aftermath of everything breaking on your own. It’s not a lie, really, even though his absence is not your choice, you convince yourself, because the fact is that he’s not there and you still find the strength to go on without him, and you pretend you don’t need him next to you. It’s not a lie, really, and sometimes, you even manage to believe it yourself, so what’s the harm in telling her?


	10. Hemlock (Conium Maculatum)

This is the bad end. This is the part where all the air around your head turns to tar (black, and sticky, viscous and pungent). This is the part where your bones shatter and turn to chalk, this is the part where your skin burns and peels away. This is the bad end and it goes like this:

You don’t talk to Draco again.

In the soft light of July dawns, when the sky is pink and grey above the rooftops, you stare at the rows of plantlings on your kitchen table — wolfsbane and valerian and morning glory, all soft green leaves sprouting from rich, black soil. You place three leaves of St. John’s Wort in you cup, and you pour coffee over it, and you pretend this is who you always were.

And in the smooth darkness of July evenings, you walk barefoot through the country side and you sit in the midst of brambles, running your fingers lightly over their shiny, red-green berries that will drip rich, purple juice from your fingers come September, and you sit under blackthorn bushes, you pick out the astringent, blue-black berries and place them upon your tongue to reassure you that you’re still alive, to feel anything at all. And in the comforting quiet of the falling night, you listen to all the sounds around you (the wind in the leaves and the animals scratching at the earth and the bugs living out their tiny, tiny lives) and you pretend you’re not falling apart.

You focus all your energy into everything you know you are, into being enough for yourself once again, into making your life into a world you can live in, and you don’t talk to Draco again.

You are falling apart.

You’re falling apart, in all the moments between dawn and dusk, and in all the moments between dusk and dawn and it’s breaking you in half, the intensity of his absence. You’re falling apart, and in the soft July night, when everyone’s sound asleep, you cry and cry and cry until your body feels liquid and you wish you could seep into the ground and never get up again. You’re falling apart in the brazen light and heavy heat of July afternoons and you try to hold your breath long enough to disappear entirely, to turn into air and let the light breeze disperse all the particles of your sadness.

Sometimes, Draco knocks at your door. He comes in the middle of the night at first, when it’s easy to pretend to be asleep (but you don’t sleep anymore, not really, so you hear every knock of his fingers on the door, and you hear every breath, so you walk to the door quietly, and you place your hands on the thin wood and caress it and pretend it’s his hand or his face.) He comes in the middle of the night and you know with every fibre of your being that if your hands found their way to the door handle, and if your fingers turned that key (a swift, circular motion, flesh meeting cold metal like you’ve done a thousand times before), he’d be standing there, beautiful eyes dark with worry in his beautiful face, and all your resolve would crumble because you love him, you love him, you love him.

You don’t open the door.

Draco starts coming during the day. And it’s all you used to want, it is — you used to wish and wish that you were good enough for broad daylight, that he’d let you step out of the liminal spaces, that you could stop hiding under the moon and behind walls and doors all the time. You used to wish and wish until your heart felt raw in your chest but now, you’re too busy lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling and counting your breaths to open the door. And you wish you still had it in you, to find a way to be close to him again, to forgive him and carry on loving him, but there are roots coming out from your spine and digging down into the earth, but you can’t figure how feet or legs work at all, but you’ve buried your vocal cords under all the blackthorn bushes in exchange for their fruit. So you don’t answer the door at all.

You hear him crying in your hallway once. He sounds broken and it shatters every bone in your body. You hear him whisper your name against the walls and there is a raw kind of desperation in his voice but by the time you’ve found the strength to stand, he’s long gone and you stare at the emptiness in the hallway, trying to grasp at the lingering smell of his soap.

Draco comes, and comes, until, one day, he doesn’t anymore.

Still, his absence continues eating at your insides until you think all the muscle and bones underneath your skin must have liquefied, until you feel like a shell, like a discarded glove or a lost shoe. And you pretend it’s okay, you do, even though no one would see if you didn’t. And you pretend it’s okay because if you know if stop pretending, you’ll have to admit that you loved him more than you’ve ever loved yourself, and you’re not sure you can get over him at all.

And, worse of all, you’ll have to admit that you lost him, you’ll have to admit that perhaps you’ve never had him at all, and that would hurt more than you think you could bear so you pretend that life goes on as always and you step softly around all the demons that follow you, and haunt you, and crush your airways late at night.

Because you lost him, because you gave up on him, because you couldn’t make him stay, and it’s always going to hang over your head like fog.


	11. Honeysuckle (Lonicera Periclymenum)

This is the good end. This is everything you wish and hope and dream and never dare to voice at all. This is the good end and it goes like this:

You’ve let your feet walk the path to the hedgerow again, and you’ve let your mind be filled with the easy assurance that you know this way, you know the twists and turns, you know all the place where you need to climb over wooden fences, you know the twigs and the flowers and the exact placement of the trees. Somehow, knowing soothes you, somehow knowing makes you feel like you belong here and you fit into this place. Somehow, knowing makes you able to breathe again.

You’ve lain down underneath a thick hawthorn bush and you’re trying to commit to memory the delicate indentation of its leaves. The air is fragrant and the setting sun fills the sky with shades of orange and turquoise and you don’t hear him approaching at all.

He doesn’t say a word, he sits down in the soft grass of the meadow next to you and he doesn’t say a word but you know it’s him all the same, because he smells like cedar and cloves and your heart is suddenly solid in your chest, beating, beating, beating, sending blood crashing against your ribs and your eardrums and the bone of your jaw. He’s quiet still, the fragrance of him melting into the sweetness of honeysuckle until the warm air is heady and intoxicating. You don’t dare say anything either, but you stretch out your arm towards him, hand open, palm facing the burning skies.

He places his hand in yours, without a word. You close your fingers, not pressing too hard, for fear he’ll think it was a mistake but he strokes the inside of your wrist with his thumb instead, and you don’t dare move for a long while, as the sun sets and the moon rises and everything grows dark in the sweet summer air.

“I’ve missed you” — his voice is broken and soft, as if he hadn’t had any use for it in the past month while the two of you weren’t talking. And it seeps through your skin, that voice, and it drips into the frozen heart in the centre of your chest.

“I’ve missed you too.” the heart replies before your head can think better of it. “More than you know” you add because it’s the truth and you’ve grown tired of lies.

When you turn your head to look at him, almost certain by now that he won’t run away and leave, he’s staring at you with those soft, silky grey eyes of his. He smiles and when you smile back, you find that your lips taste like salt and though you don’t remember crying, your cheeks are wet.

And at that precise moment, just like that, the concrete cast you built around your heart splits clean across the middle as you remember how to be alive all at once, and the intensity of every feeling washes over you. The loss of him, his unbearable absence, the love that runs deep in your veins like underground rivers, the desire to hold him close and tell him — tell him everything.

“I’m sorry” is as close as you can get to everything. _I’m sorry I fell apart_ you mean, and _I’m sorry I left you._ _I’m sorry I broke my promise to always be there_ and _I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough_ and the bitter sweetness of _I’m sorry I love you too much._

“I’m sorry too”, he whispers as he shifts his weight, and lifts his hand away from yours, only to lay down at your side instead, head resting on your arm, his breath warm against your bare skin. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be everything you needed.”

You pull him flush against you at the sound of those words, arms tightly wound around him, and you bury your face in his hair. And before he can speak again, before you can reassure him that he’s enough, he’s more than enough, the dam in your heart overflows and you tell him you love him instead. You tell him you love him and you love him, and you love him — and you know you shouldn’t say it at all, but it’s all you can think, and it’s the language your body speaks now, and you love him, oh god you love him. And he holds you tighter as you do, pressing burning kisses along your neck and your jaw and your forehead, so you cry, and you laugh, and you tell him you love him again and again and again until you feel entirely drunk on the words and the emotions and the warmth of his scent and his skin.

“I love you too” — his words: a scared, soft kind of whisper.

“I love you too” — and you thought you misheard the first time, but you’re entirely sure you’ve heard it the second time and you hold those words to your chest like something more precious than gold.

“I love you too” — he says it out loud now, and he’s crying and laughing all at once, and you know, and you feel that this is what he’s meant in every touch and every word and every kiss since you’ve known him.

“I love you too” — he’s shouting it at the top of his lungs now, holding you by the shoulders and staring straight into your eyes. And you feel lighter than you’ve ever felt in your entire life, and you’re quite certain that if he were to let go, you’d float up and up and up until you reached the moon, but you’re also quite certain that he’s not letting go, that he’s never letting go, that you’ve found each other now and you’re never losing each other again.

And as the moon rises in the sky, a thin crescent of light, you talk of other things too — you talk of how it feels to have a wolf living under your skin, and you talk of the crushing loneliness of turning into a ghost, and you talk of all the times you couldn’t say the words because they were too heavy on your tongue, because they were in a language you couldn’t speak at all. You talk and talk and talk until the moon is high above your head, and all the old wounds have been covered in the salve of words and dressed in promises and forgiveness.

You fall asleep under the hawthorn bush that night, lips thoroughly kissed and cheeks flushed, and Draco curled up against your chest. You sow soft kisses, light kisses in the gold of his hair, and you hold him tight and you love him so much, that beautiful boy, and he loves you back and this is everything you ever wished for.


	12. Meadow Saffron (Colchicum Autumnale)

This is the true end, but really, it’s not an ending at all. This is the true end and it goes like this:

It was never going to be easy, loving Draco Malfoy. It was never going to be easy, because he’s broken and scarred, because guilt and shame intertwine with the bones and the muscles under his skin. It was never going to be easy, because his sense of self waxes and wanes with the moons and you were never going to be able to change that.

It was never going to be easy, loving Draco Malfoy, but then again, it was never going to be easy being Neville Longbottom either. It was never going to be easy being Neville who fell into a hole after the war ended and refused to acknowledge his own pain at all. It was never going to be easy being Neville who lost those he loved, and Neville who never wanted blood on his hands, and Neville who never really fit anywhere.

It was never going to be easy, but you’ve never gone for easy, have you? It was never going to be easy, but that was never the point because you’ve done nothing your entire life but hold on, and hold on, and hold on, and you have someone to hold onto, now. You have someone to hold on for.

When you were a child, you used to spend hours staring at dandelions growing through cracks of the pavements. You used to detail the soft green leaves, and bright flowers, and delicate white crowns of tiny parachutes, and you used to marvel at the way they seemed to grow straight out of the cobbles. You grew, and you learned about botany, and you filled your entire house with plants — fragile and rare flowers, poison plants and healing herb — but you’ll always remember the awe you felt for dandelions, their yellow corollas and their windborne seeds. 

You’re dandelions, the both of you. You found a way to grow and bloom when there was none at all. You’re dandelions: the kind of flower no one looks at twice, but that have a thousand names (blowball and cankerwort, doon-head-clock and witch's gowan, lion's-tooth and Irish daisy, monks-head and puff-ball) and have lived a thousand lives, each and every one in silence.

Of course, it still hurts, sometimes, saying anything else would be a lie and you try to not do that so much, these days. It hurts when quiet grows over him like a vine and you feel like you can’t reach him. It still hurts sometimes when you can feel the wolf stirring under his skin and you can’t soothe his pain at all. It still hurts sometimes, but it’s all worth it, because it’s beautiful, it is. It’s beautiful and it’s true and it’s deep.

And then, there are all the parts where it doesn’t hurt at all. There are all the parts where you stare at his beautiful face and you’re so, so in love. There are all the parts where he’s soft and sweet and you can tell he loves you from the way he strokes your shoulders, from the way he tucks your hair behind your ear when it gets a bit too long, from the way his voice sounds like spices and warm honey when he wishes you good night. There are all the parts where he lets you hold his hand and say nothing at all and where you just feel right, for the first time your entire life.

You feel wanted.

And it was never going to be easy, and it’s not, of course it’s not, but it gets easier, it does, every day a bit more. It gets easier as you learn where all his jagged edges lay, and all the cracks in his soul. It gets easier as you learn to speak his careful sort of dialect and teach him the language of your heart. And it gets easier as he learns to call your demons by their true names and finds out the exact right spots to scatter salt and grow mullein to keep them at bay. And it gets easier, as you grow and grow and heal a bit more every day, as you find it a little easier to breathe, a little easier to trust, a little easier to believe you are loved.

And it was never going to be easy, because easy is not for people like you, is not for people with war-worn hearts and wolves under their skins and bones that turn to chalk, but it doesn’t have to be easy, you’ve come to realise. It doesn’t have to be easy in order to be beautiful, and larger than life, and worth all the efforts. And it’s not easy, it isn’t, but it is all of these things, and more than everything, it is yours. It is yours, you’ve shaped it in your image, and you’ve made it into what it is: intricate, and amazing, and complicated, and absolutely perfect.


End file.
